I finally got a UI designer to complete the mockups for my site. And when it was time to get the HTML markup, he suggested I use a “Design to HTML” service. There is lots of them out there. You pretty much give them the Photoshop PSD file, and in return they provide you with XHTML/CSS markup.

So I gave it a try….my verdict? Won’t do it again….

Now this is no criticism of the company that does it, because they are good at what they do and serve a purpose. The only problem is that their purpose is not my purpose Its a good solution if you are not intending to work with the templates they provide, and possibly just use it for a static website.

Problem is that they don’t think of their CSS in a way that is re-usable, they create CSS styles for absolutely everything and don’t think about optimising the CSS for re-use across pages. The end result is that your XHTML is nice and concise, but the CSS is very verbose and long (100′s of lines).

I have ended up using their XHTML and re-creating most of the CSS so that I can re-use it in my application as a template. I am still going through this process and therefore, something that would have taken me a few days to do (create XHTML/CSS from Design), is still taking me a few days to do, but I have the added complexity of working with code that was written by someone else.

Oh well, a lesson learned

I have decided to blog about this, as I have had never ending problems in the past to try and get this configured. Here is the scenario; you have a project that requires hosting a single website in a single web domain, but you have a mix of PHP applications and Java (or in my instance, GRAILS) applications that you need to run. The way you do this, is configure both PHP and Java applications to run through an Apache front end. The problem is, that there is no good documentation to help you do this, so here I go!

In this example, I am going to show you how to run a static html site, plus a PHP application (we’ll use WordPress for this example) and a java .WAR applications all off the same instance of apache on the same server. Our site will look like this;

• http://www.mydomain.com/ – will have a static html site and will have links to other pages and directories under this domain, with the exception of;
• http://www.mydomain.com/blog – will be running WordPress, a PHP blogging application, &
• http://www.mydomain.com/quotation – will run a java application packaged as a .WAR

I am assuming that you have access to your own server, or virtual private server (I recommend NeoSurge hosting if you need one), and that you are running Ubuntu Server (Although my instructions are for Ubuntu, they are easily transferable to other falvours of Linux). Here is the process form start to end to get it setup;

Server Setup

I am using Ubuntu Server 9.04, and I have set up a ‘vanilla’ instance of the server running with none of the options configured (DNS etc). Now start the server & login with the userename and password elected on the install

Firstly we will install some tools that will come in handy later such as ssh (for terminal access), I use nano for text editing (which may not installed), but you may prefer to install vi or vim, and an ftp server

NB: I have included SSH installation, but with most VPS and hosted providers, this will be done for you (Otherwise, you wouldn’t be able to get into your server You will only need to do this if you want to run a virtual machine in your own environment).

Install OpenSSH

To install openSSH, type the following in the command line (NB: you will be prompted to enter your password again to gain SuperUser access – which is what the sudo command is)

sudo apt-get install openssh-server

After the installation process, you will have openSSH on the server. Next we install FTP

Install FTP Server – vsftpd

sudo apt-get install vsftpd

To allow log on access for authenticated users, you need to edit /etc/vsftpd.conf

sudo nano /etc/vsftpd.conf

find the following two lines and uncomment them (they are near each other)

local_enable=YES
write_enable=YES

Now restart the ftp server so your new settings can be picked up

sudo /etc/init.d/vsftpd restart

Now you should be able to ftp, and ssh to the server so that you can make changes and upload files – which you will need to do when you start configuring mod-proxy

Install required Software

Next you will need to install all the software such as mysql, apache, PHP, tomcat etc. I will be just installing all the basic software, so I won’t go into the details of installing PHPMyAdmin if you require it. As there are lots of tutorials out there on how to do that.

Install mysql

sudo apt-get install mysql-server

This will take a while, but after its done, you will have MySql installed. Again, you will need to configure MySql to be able to create databases etc remotely, but as is, you can ssh into your machine and do what you need to do in the MySql command line.

Install apache, java and tomcat

Now you will install Apache, Java, Tomcat and Tomcat Admin application so that your web server and Java setup is complete, this can be done in a single command;

sudo apt-get install apache2 sun-java6-jdk tomcat6 tomcat6-admin

You will need to go through the license acceptance process, and depending on your internet link speed, the above may take a while.

Install php

Now that Apache is installed, you can go ahead and install the PHP extensions so that php code can be parsed and rendered.

sudo apt-get install php5
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

That’s it!!! All the software is now installed and its time to do some configuration.

Configuration

First we are going to enable mod-proxy. Mod-proxy is the extension to apache that allows you to use apache as the proxy for web requests but then passes on the processing to tomcat (in our example). We are going to be using the AJP connector, but its pretty much the same process if you wanted to use the http connector or one of the other various adapters that apache provides.

Enable mod-proxy

sudo a2enmod proxy_ajp

After you enable the proxy, you now need to allow the proxying to occur. You do this by modifying your proxy.conf file.

sudo nano /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/proxy.conf

Find where it says “Order deny,allow”, and change the text underneath so it looks like the following

Order deny,allow
Allow from all
#Deny from all

Quite simply, you are now allowing all rules to be proxied, and turning off the Deny rules (you can obviously get more fine tuned here, and you will see lots of security warnings, which I recommend you listen to, but for the moment this will get you by.).

Allow AJP port by uncommenting the connector in Tomcat

sudo nano /etc/tomcat6/server.xml

and uncomment

<Connector port=”8009″ protocol=”AJP/1.3″ redirectPort=”8443″ />

Add an admin and manager user for tomcat

sudo nano /etc/tomcat6/tomcat-users.xml

<role rolename=”admin”/>
<role rolename=”manager”/>
<user username=”yourUser” password=”aPassword” roles=”admin,manager”/>

Give tomcat some more memory (default is never enough) and disable tomcat’s security

sudo nano /etc/default/tomcat6

and uncomment and change the following

JAVA_OPTS=”-Djava.awt.headless=true -Xms128M -Xmx1280M -XX:MaxPermSize=256m”
TOMCAT6_SECURITY=no

Setup tomcat

So now you are going to setup tomcat so that you can run WARs in the tomcat Servlet Container.

sudo nano /etc/tomcat6/server.xml

First thing we are going to do is change the host setting. I do this by leaving the default host and creating a new one for our purposes. Add an another <Host/> node below the existing one in server.xml

<Host name=”ServletName” appBase=”webapps/ServletName”
unpackWARs=”true” autoDeploy=”true” xmlValidation=”false” xmlNamespaceAware=”false”>
</Host>

The important thing in the above node is the appBase. This should point to the webapps directory (unless you have created a new one), and then the directory that will contain the servlet container. Even though unpackWARs is set to true, I find this a bit strange and like to unpack my own WARs, so I would also create the directory and in the location that is going to hold the exploded war.

sudo mkdir /var/lib/tomcat6/webapps/ServletName
sudo chown tomcat6:tomcat6  /var/lib/tomcat6/webapps/ServletName

Uplaod the War to /var/lib/tomcat6/webapps

And unpack it (unzip, and make sure it has the same name as the directory under webapps)

OK, now configure the proxy settings for apache, back in the proxy.conf

sudo nano /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/proxy.conf

Turn On Proxy requests on and configure the proxying (you can put this anywhere in the file, but I like to put the following at the top of the file)

ProxyRequest On
ProxyPreserveHost On
ProxyPass /ServletName ajp://localhost:8009/ServletName
ProxyPassReverse /ServletName ajp://localhost:8009/ServletName

and at the end of the file

ProxyVia On

The important part of the above change is that you are configuring what requests to apache are going to be passed to tomcat for processing. Above I am telling any request to /ServletName will be passed through. you can also tell it to ignore certain directories as well. For example, one common use would be to route all traffic to tomcat, but ignore static files that you want to apache to process for performance reasons. To do this, you would do something like;

ProxyPass /css !
ProxyPass /images !
ProxyPass / ajp://localhost:8009/

Pretty self explanatory, the only thing to keep in mind is any directories you want to ignore need to come first.

Finally, restart apache and then tomcat

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
sudo /etc/init.d/tomcat6 restart

That’s it – you are done!!!!

So now what?

At the start of this post, I talked about configuring the following sites;

• http://www.mydomain.com/ – your static html;
• http://www.mydomain.com/blog – WordPress PHP blog
• http://www.mydomain.com/quotation – Java App

Well now that the configuration has been done – its pretty easy. To host your static site, just upload all your html, css, js & images etc into your root directory. You should find this in /var/www. To host your WordPress blog, its as easy as creating the directory /var/www/blog and uploading wordpress here.

PHP is all configured and you should be able to go through the standard installation process for WordPress by going to your url http://someurl.com./blog.

And finally the /quotation directory in my example is the directory that you need to use in the tutorial above where I have used ServletName.

Once you have done all this, and restarted tomcat and apache, all three sites; static, php and java should be working seamlessly….!!

Have Fun….

So you wake up in a cold sweat one night as you are in a ‘half sleep”. While you were in this delirious moment, you conjure up the most amazing idea that is going to make you a bazillion dollars and no one has done it before!!!!!

ho hum…………………..BORING!!!!

This is one of those urban myths that seems to never go away. People are always trying to stumble on that next killer idea. But the thing is, you and I probably have these great “wouldn’t it be awesome if…..” ideas almost every second day. And so does everyone. Since I am in the business of making ideas come to reality, I get my share of friends (also known as nut cases that think I am waiting for them to bombard me with their next great idea) calling me with their idea and are surprised by the fact that I don’t drop everything to work with them !?!?

So if this is not important, what is?

Your Customer!!! Its that simple…

Its much easier to fill an existing void for your customer than it is to convince your customer that they are in need of this fabulous invention. And timing is key, if you get it out too early, there will be no demand (you are trying to convince them they need it); too late and you have missed the market (someone else has beat you to it and your customers already have the product).

Its also important to extract the idea into reality. How much will it cost to build and distribute. “I can get it into every household in the country over the next 5 years!!!”, but when you do the numbers, the revenue you make never catches up to the cost of marketing and distribution (or maybe in 20 years it does) #FAIL.

You need to get ‘real’ customers in front of your product; get feedback, evolve, refine, more experimentation and testing, and work on filling that need.

In a recent project I was working on I had a requirement to be able to set up Quartz jobs programatically as the application is running. So in other words, when the app is started, there are no jobs scheduled or running, but through a user interface, create jobs and schedule them. I could not find any info on how to do this effectively in Grails, but found it to be easy. Real Easy!!!

Start by installing Quartz;

grails install-plugin quartz

Typically when creating Quartz Jobs in Grails, you would now go ahead and do “grails create-job”, but doing so will automatically trigger the job to run every minute (even if you leave the trigger off) as a default.

Instead, we are going to create a Service to run as a Job. That’s right you can use regular grails services as a Job Class with some minor modifications. And all the Grails Service goodness comes along with it

grails create-service JobScheduler

To make the service to act as a Job, you need to do a few things. The service needs to implement the Job Interface and has to include an execute method (I also needed to use the execute method that took the JobExecutionContext) so your JobScheduler class looks like this;

import org.quartz.Job

import org.quartz.JobExecutionContext;

class JobScheduler implements Job{

boolean transactional = false

public void execute (JobExecutionContext jobExecutionContext) {

println “I have been triggered to run ” + new Date()

}

}

In this example, my job is just printing a statement so I know that the job has run. So now we need to schedule the actual job. Triggering a job can be done through a controller, service or wherever you like. And make sure you check out the JavaDocs for SimpleTrigger and TriggerUtils, they are your friends!!! The only thing to remember is to include the quartzScheduler Bean from the app context

Here are some examples of how you can do it.

Firstly, schedule a one-off job so you just schedule your JobService to be called at some time in the future, this is quite easily done with the SimpleTrigger. Add the following to your controller

def quartzScheduler

And then add the following action

def scheduleOneOff() {

def jobDetail = new JobDetail(“myJob”, null, JobScheduler.class);

def trigger = new SimpleTrigger(“myTrigger”, null, new Date() + 1)

quartzScheduler.scheduleJob(jobDetail, trigger);

}

How easy was that?!?! Its pretty self explanatory, but as you can see we create a JobDetail, which passes the job name, “myJob”, group name (null in this instance) and you pass the Job Class. This is where you tell it about your service you previously created.

We then create a trigger for our Job which in this instance is a simple trigger with the name “myTrigger”, and again a null group and start date in 1 day (you can obviously set it to whatever you want by passing a valid date object).

Finally using the quartzScheduler bean, you schedule the job by passing the jobDetail and trigger to the scheduleJob method.

What about scheduling a recurring job that starts at 2am on the 1st of every month? Easy, use the makeMonthlyTrigger method from the TriggerUtils anonymous class;

def scheduleMonthly() {

def jobDetail = new JobDetail(“myJob”, null, JobScheduler.class);

def trigger = TriggerUtils.makeMonthlyTrigger(1, 2, 0);

trigger.setStartTime(new Date() + 1)

trigger.setName(“myTrigger”);

quartzScheduler.scheduleJob(jobDetail, trigger);

}

Things are very similar except that we have used the makeMonthlyTrigger and passed the start date, hour and minute. We have also told it to start in one day from today (as before) and have given our trigger a name.

There are helper methods to set triggers to happen on the minute, hour, week, month etc and of course you can schedule using your handy Cron expressions too.

By passing JobDetail parameters to your JobService, you could theoretically just use that JobService as a scheduler wrapper service and it can then be a generic scheduler for any job you may want to trigger.

I am a big fan of the Apple AppStore process, and I find myself buying anything that I think will be useful. And generally they work. But recently, I bought an App that just would not work for me. So a disclaimer; The application was Mini Confluence, which is an Atlassian Confluence Client for the iPhone. And for the life of me, it just would not authenticate with any of the Confluence instances I have. So I can’t comment on the application itself, it may be fantastic, but for me it doesn’t work.

So after spending $5.99 and not having it work, I though I would try my luck at getting a refund. And let me tell you that I wasn’t feeling very optimistic about the process, but my expectations were unfounded.

I started by selecting the Contact Support option from the AppStore, and I told them what my issue was. And within 12 hours, I got the following response;

Dear Rob,

I understand that you purchased the application “Mini Confluence” but it will not work on your iPhone. I know how eager you must be to have this resolved and I will be happy to assist you any way that I can with this issue.

Since you are unable to enjoy this application, I will gladly refund this purchase for you. However, please know that the order containing this item is currently processing. I would like you to be assured that I have retained your case so that I may personally make sure the purchase is refunded. Please note that processing can take up to five business days from the date of purchase.

Thank you for your patience. Have a wonderful weekend!

Sincerely,

Julia
iTunes Store Customer Support

Well that was a promising start, but I still had this awkward feeling that there is going to be some chasing up on my part, which I was even wondering whether I would do for $5.99. But then 2 days later, I get this email;

Dear Rob,

Thank you for your patience. I am happy to let you know that I have reversed the charge for the purchase of “Mini Confluence”. In three to five business days, a credit of $5.99 should be posted to the credit card that appears on the receipt for that purchase.

I have also submitted this item for investigation. Apple takes the quality of the items offered on the iTunes Store seriously and will investigate the issue with this item.

Thank you for your understanding. I hope that you continue to enjoy using the iTunes Store. Have a wonderful day!

Sincerely,

Julia
iTunes Store Customer Support

Awesome! Nothing to be done. And then within a couple of hours of that email, I get another “Adjustment Note” email that highlights that a -$5.99 adjustment has been made against my Credit Card for the purchase.

Now that is what I call customer experience. I like to think that I am not an Apple Fanboy, but Apple constantly impresses me with their attention to detail right across their business spectrum. I can’t say that they are perfect, but with a response like the above, I will not hesitate to make other purchases through the AppStore!!

I recently re-discovered a power feature on Firefox, and its ability to use keywords to help Firefox know which search engine you want to use without having to select it from the search engine lists.

Why do this, well if you are like me, and get annoyed at the need of selecting a search engine form the drop down with your mouse before executing the search. Then you probably just don’t do it.

So here is the trick; Select the list of search engine drop downs on your Firefox search bar, and select “Manage Search Engines”. Now go through and add keywords to your favourite search engines. I only have a few, so I use single letter keywords. ‘g’ for Google, ‘e’ for eBay, ‘w’ for Wikipedia etc. Keep it simple. Your done! Now to search to Google, just type ‘g your search term’ in the address bar and it will search google. Try a few options of switching search engines. Command-T (on Mac) and y9ou open a new tab, then start typing;

• g news for sydney
• w portals
• e iPod 8gb (e is my eBay keyword)

Now to tidy things, up, get rid of that search bar which you no longer need and make your address bar longer. Right click on any blank space on the Firefox Header and select “Customize”. Now drag your search bar off the window and into the customize window and it disappears.

Now your really done! Feel the speed power and power of firefox!!

Some great work has come out of the plugins available for Grails. One of my favorite is the Active MQ (and JMS) plugins that allow grails (very easily) to integrate Java message. I have used these before, but then come up against an issue when upgrading my projects to Grails 1.2 M2. They stopped working!!!

So with some help from @domix (behind Active MQ plugin), and @ldaley (behind JMS plugin), I managed to get this working. Essentially there were two issues;

• the bean name had changed from “connectionFactory” to “jmsConnectionFactory”
• The static variable to declare in your consuming service is “exposes” not “expose” as in the examples

In the spirit of making this a more complete picture, I thought I would post a quick tutorial on how I made this work;

1. Start a new project – I called mine “ActiveMQTest”

grails create-app ActiveMQTest
cd ActiveMQTest

2. Install the plugins

grails install-plugin activemq
grails install plugin jms

IMPORTANT: Make sure you get the latest plugins. Particularly 0.1 of the ActiveMQ plugin (@domix applied the fixes to this to make it work for Grails 1.2)

3. Create a controller to test the messaging service

grails create-controller notifier

open up this controller (NotifierController) and paste the following code in

class NotifierController {

     def index = {
          def message = [
               date:new Date().toString(),
               mess:"I just got posted from the Notifier",
               count:1
          ]
          sendJMSMessage("queue.notify", message)
          render "My message was sent on " + new Date()
          }
     }

4. Now create a service class that will act as your message consumer

grails create-service consumer

and paste the following code in the file (ConsumerService)

     class ConsumerService {
          boolean transactional = false
          static exposes = ['jms']
          static destination = "queue.notify"

          def onMessage = {
               println "I got the message '${it.mess}', on ${it.date}, with count = ${it.count}"
          }
     }

5. Run the app and click on the Notifier controller link

You should see the browser render something like;

My message was sent on Fri Aug 21 14:54:01 EST 2009

And almost instantaneously, your console will render something like this

I got the message 'I just got posted from the Notifier', on Fri Aug 21 14:54:01 EST 2009, with count = 1

So What Happened?

This is basically demonstrating that when the controller is called, it creates an object called ‘message’. It then populates it with some primitives (this object can only handle primitives), and by using the sendJMSMessage() method, it queues the message onto a queue called “queue.notify”.

Just to show that this didn’t throw an error, the web pages is rendered with a notification that the process completed.

At this stage, the messages is queued onto the queue “queue.notify” which is declared by the static variable “destination” in our service. The static variable is provided the name of the queue;

static destination = "queue.notify"

The other thing is to tell JMS that this service needs to be exposed as a JMS Consumable service, and you do that by declaring the static variable ;

static exposes = ['jms']

That’s it! All you have to do is create a closure called onMessage, which is what JMS is calling when instatiating the service, and passed the message into it. In this instance we are just printing out the details of what is passed in the message.

For those of you that know me, you will know that I am a big fan of Grails and Groovy. This week we have had 2 huge announcements. Firstly that VMWare has acquired SpringSource (Groovy and Grails custodian), and then Grails 1.2 M2 got released yesterday.

I downloaded 1.2 M2 last night and I am super keen to start using some of the new features! Find out about them here. Or download it now!

I am totally in love with the Named Queries which allows you to create pre-defined queries (with a name) in the domain class that you can consequently re-use in the application. Example from the release notes;

class Publication {
   String title
   Date datePublished
   static namedQueries = {
       recentPublications {
           def now = new Date()
           gt 'datePublished', now - 365
       }

       publicationsWithBookInTitle {
           like 'title', '%Book%'
       }

   }

}

You can do
// get all recent publications…
def recentPubs = Publication.recentPublications()
// get all recent publications (alternate syntax)…
def recentPubs = Publication.recentPublications.list()

// get up to 10 recent publications, skip the first 5…
def recentPubs = Publication.recentPublications(max: 10, offset: 5)
def recentPubs = Publication.recentPublications.list(max: 10, offset: 5)

// get the number of recent publications…
def numberOfRecentPubs = Publication.recentPublications.count()

// get a recent publication with a specific id…
def pub = Publication.recentPublications.get(42)

The other exciting changes is that tomcat is now the default container for building apps in, but this is accomplished through the plugin architecture, so it is just as easy to uninstall Tomcat and re-install Jetty again. Brilliant!!

Another win for me is the pre-compilation of GSPs in the WAR deployment. I host many of my grails apps on Virtual Private Servers, which usually have limited resource capabilities. So i find they constantly fall over at startup. This should certainly help that cause.

Other features worth a mention include;

• Named URL Mappings
• Support for hasOne mapping in the domain classes
• Implementation of Spring 3 into the codebase and therefore support for all Spring 3 annotations

So it is time to get programming!!!

UPDATE: Just came across this one too. As of 1.2 Grails now creates your IntelliJ Project files too!! As a user of IDEA, this is just awesome.

Don’t you find that when you get a small team working on a project, that they end up being far more productive compared to when you load that team up with many developers, designers, testers etc?

Well I have, so much so, that I tried to formalize it at Aegeon.

We called it ‘trailblazing’ development, but I sometimes lovingly called it “Guerrilla Warfare Development” too. Anyone that has ever been to a Code Party or Developer/Startup camp will be familiar with it. Essentially the principles are to address the 20% of functionality that delivers 80% of the value to users. It addresses the most typical use cases and ignores the ‘fringe’ use cases.

The purpose of this is really to answer the question; “I have this idea, and I am pretty sure it would work, but I am not sure – what do you think?”, then you apply the “Nike – Just Do It” attitude. So rather than spend weeks/months on planning, documentation, meetings and discussions, you get the key people in a room to work on the project.

Here are some suggestions on how you too can implement this;

1. Don’t worry about Scope, at first

Don’t get hung up on fixing the scope at first. Just focus on working out what the core of the offering is. In fact, as you will see below, try not to fix the scope at all. Just make a list of the features you want to deliver, and prioritize them. then start from the top of the list and work your way down. But let your team work in flux with this. Because you are wanting to get intense work out of an extremely focused team, you will need them to work on what they want – just give them guidance on what YOU want – and that is the list.

2. Focus

This really should be no# 1 on the list. You need to focus, focus, focus. More so than ever. You need to omit the details, remember that you are working on the most common flow through your app. So for example, if you need people to login to your app, then build that. You are not going to build “forgot password” or “forgot username” they can come later. You can’t “WOW” users with this functionality.

3. 2x Developers, Designer and Product Lead

This was my magic team. Your designer is working on your UI, hopefully you can split your devs to a front end and back end dev, and your product lead is focusing on the functionality and doubles up as a tester. You want this team t be cross-functional as well (so that everyone can do a little bit of the other person’s job). The product lead tests to make sure that the key parts are being delivered. BTW: It is important to raise and prioritize defects. But only address the real critical blockers as part of this process.

4. Don’t ignore solid foundations

Always make sure you are building on a solid foundation. That is, you don’t want this to be a throwaway exercise. Build on tried and tested frameworks, and because in all likelihood, you will be moving what you are building into a production world, you need to make sure you are doing things right, or at least in a fashion where you can refactor them to be right. My platform of choice here is Grails, but RoR, .net, php frameworks and lightweight Java frameworks can be good for this process too.

5. Know your compromises

You will need to make certain compromises when going through this process. Such as;

• Limited testing and test coverage
• Code quality may not be great
• It will be buggy
• it won’t have ‘spit and polish’

These are things that you will need to come back to. BUT (and a big BUT), make sure that you do schedule into the next phase to do so! The purpose of this exercise is to prototype quickly, and then build from the prototype, but you always want to make sure where you are starting from is a good base. Since you are probably halving your dev effort/time, factor in 25% at the start of the next phase to do cleanup.

6. Fix time it – everything else floats

If you want to fix time to a weekend, a week, a month or 3 months, it doesn’t matter. The key here is to fix time, not your deliverable. Remember, you don’t want to fix your scope, you just want to have a task list and attempt to deliver as much as you can in a fixed amount of time. The team needs to know that they have X amount of time to deliver something that works. They will then make the compromises as to how to deliver what they can in the time they have.

7. Co-locate

Co-location always helps with the development effort, as it reduced communication issues. I like putting the 4 people on a single table, that is the most ‘bang for buck’ communication you will ever have. But as long as they are co-located in the same room, you will get the benefits. When your time is limited, the last thing you want to be doing is spending time emailing and having meetings.

8. Motivation

Typically, I have not found this to be an issue. Fixing the time and floating the scope makes this exciting. But try and do some things such as prizes and awards for such things as most features delivered in a week or least amount of bugs etc. This motivates the team to do ‘better’ work. I have found that one of the most powerful things that motivates the team is to empower them. Let them decide what they want to build. Just guide them. And don’t worry, with a mature team, nothing will be forgotten, they will get around to everything, you won’t have anything missed.

9. The aftermath

Finally, we have the aftermath to cleanup. I have already talked about the cleanup you need to do in “Know your Compromises”. But try and schedule a portion of time after the effort ends to do general cleanup. Things such as;

• Remove links to functionality not implemented yet
• Stub any tests that need to be done
• Clean up any UI glitches
• Fail gracefully (maybe through standard error page) on unimplemented functionality

In Conclusion

Give it a shot, I would love to hear experiences from others about how they went, or if they have had similar experiences in setting up such a team. What were the benefits and downsides, what would you do different? I am keen to do more of this type of development, and want to learn from others too.

And on the suggestion of @RobertFischer, you must also subscribe to being a Rockstar Ninja

I recently read a blog posting from Seth Godin, that really hit the spot with me. Selling to business (particularly to small business) can be particularly challenging. Not only will they want exceptional value for their investment and ensure low costs, but they are extremely sceptical.

More so than consumers. This can be particularly daunting as it requires the seller to jump through a number of hoops to make the sale. Seth’s blog hit some quite topical areas about how to plan the strategy around this, and how product marketers and product developers need to work together.

In my experience (particularly in software), this is left too late. Developers come up with a great product, and then marketers are told “productise it!”. Turing a ‘thing’ into a ‘product’ is part of the lifecycle, and as a developer, I know the importance of working with the mrketing guys to understand fundamental aspects such as;

• Who is going to be our market?
• How do we reach out them?
• What is the problem we are solving for them?
• How will we provide the “exceptional value” and “low cost” that they are after?

In a recent project, using a Guerrilla development technique where we put together 2 developers, a designer and a product lead (who doubles as a tester), the product lead was a marketer. Apart from being an strongly opinionated and visionary individual, they provided a new perspective on t he product development that  helped getting it to market sooner.